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Who's gonna be first Jesse or Buddhi ?

Suggestion: What about embedding the new Intel Embree raytracer in one of these apps? It's Apache licensed, cross-platform, SSE and even AVX optimized, supports physically based materials, and has progressive (interactive) rendering: http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/embree-photo-realistic-ray-tracing-kernels/

It should be doable to wrap the fractal calculation inside a primitive shape, as long as you can calculate the ray-intersection and normal. But of course, it always sound easier than it is...

There is one of Budhi`s renders where he did some trick to make the top layer of the box it`s surface semi-transparent so it was possible to look in the box from the outside a while ago and it was cool.

I`ve tried to use a plasma and flame render with alpha channel as background to see the effects when reflections are used but it doesn`t allow me to import the image .

Sure the wizards gathered in this forum can do the trick 

i worked quite a while with fractal zplot and even with a whipped cream quat you had to be careful. depending on parameters an exported obj could easily reach 3 million polygons, to get a clean and detailed surface. bulbs and boxes are much more complex, so i think only a 64 bit app with loads of ram might handle these, if any.

I agree fully with you, stopped that voxel export because there was no file type that supported it satisfyingly (looks grammatically not that right).
And a real mesh export is just to much work for now, itso.  

Translucy with CPU inside rendering using (not working) DE's is the least efficience way i could imagine, wouldnt expect to find it in m3d.
If you export a scene, you could use single precision and GPU stuff, and there are plenty of programs that are specialised for it.



The ones with only surfaces and all outside renderings.. shiny fractal bubbles floating around (i still vote for exporting  )

could be done using Nvidia's OptiX ?

I think the (convergent smooth iteration) delta method could be made reasonably "reliable" just not particularly fast, though of course "fast" 5 years ago is slow now

Not even close:



Unless of course you're going to correct the bias across the bulbs and the variation in values dependent on the bulb periods.